conticuere24

I thought I'd give some data points and my thoughts on practice test quality. Powerprep 1: 161 V/137 Q (The Q shouldn't count because I just stopped paying attention. But I was equally inattentive in the Verbal section) Powerprep 2: 166 V/153 Q Powerprep Plus: 170 V/162 Q Paper Test: 168 V/158 Q Magoosh score estimate: 159-164 V/158-163 Q Economist GRE tutor estimate: 168 V/166 Q (the latter is too high for some reason) Manhattan Test: 167 V/161 Q Manhattan Test: 164 V/ 162 Q Final test: 169 V/163 Q About practice materials: no independent company has quite figured out the art of writing realistic GRE Verbal questions. Magoosh's questions are not just "hard" sometimes––they are completely implausible, with sentences that are ambiguous and whose answers they claim are correct can easily be disagreed with and debated. ETS questions are never ambiguous or debatable. Magoosh also vastly underestimates your score. The same goes for the Economist GRE: their passages and questions do not resemble ETS questions, and especially their text complexions can be extremely debatable, even, in my opinion, incorrect. I liked their math tutoring, though. Manhattan comes close, but their text completions are more about vocabulary than about logic. I have viscerally disagreed with their use of language and their reasoning. Use a variety of materials but take some questions with a grain of salt; if they don't feel very "ETS," they're just not good questions.

Do You have a sense of how scoring works? I'm interested in the fact that JoMarie got a 170 with 38/40 total, while I got a 168 with 37/40 total. This is from a native speaker, polylingual, literature student! I'm still angry about this

Hello everyone, I wanted to ask you all what your impression is on how scoring the New GRE works. It does not seem transparent at all. I am a literature student. I have studied texts intensively for many years now. I have studied several languages, and I tutored for a long time for the SAT. I scored between 750 - 800 consistently on practice tests for the old GRE, but I wasn't able to take the exam until this past September, so I was forced to take the new one. While I managed to achieve respectable scores in the areas that matter most to me, I'm still somewhat disappointed and confused by them. On test day, I received a 750 - 800 estimate, and I thought the test was relatively easy. I ended up getting a 168, which corresponds to a 720-730 according to the concordance table. I realize that a 168 is a good, even very good, score, but I really am surprised that I didn't get a 169 or 170, since both scores correspond to the 750 - 800 range, or 99th percentile. 168 is 98th. I am not sure how they arrived at this figure. I had a look at the diagnostic service. I answered 37/40 questions correctly, according to them. Shockingly all the questions I missed were Reading Comprehension I missed 2 L4 RC's, 1 L5. Strangely, looking at some of the other people's results on the forum who used the diagnostic service got as many, if not more, questions incorrect , and received a higher score. One person claims to have 36/40 with a 169, and a few others with 37/40 received a 169. Are RC's rated differently from the sentence completion/equivalence questions? Some of these people who got a 169 got L3 questions wrong. I don't understand how the computer arrived at this number for them and a 168 for me. I am somewhat skeptical of ETS's scoring method and concordance tables. It seems to me that the way ETS developed the concordance tables was mostly to match given percentiles in the new GRE with percentiles in the old GRE. (That is to say, because a 168 ended up being in the 98th percentile, ETS was forced to downgrade its estimate to the 720-730 range rather than the 750 - 800, because the percentiles did not line up exactly how they expected.) But what if a 168 on the new test is not really equivalent to the old GRE at all? The new test, after all, has a number of significant changes and comparing a test with analogies and one with sentence questions is rather hard indeed. How much, really, do the two tests have in common with one another? And perhaps the most qualified students were taking the new GRE in August-September 2011 anyway, such that percentiles are somewhat skewed in relation to the general population. Anyway, I understand that a 168 is fine and all, but I have no idea how it is going to be interpreted by admissions committees. It seems that now for top English/Humanities programs, the only acceptable range will be quite small (166 or possibly 165 - 170 if we go by the concordance tables and set a minimum at 700). What do you think about the new scoring system and the determination of levels of difficulty? What constitutes their difficulty? How is it best for a close reader of many difficult texts to approach a very simple passage on a very simple subject to forget everything he ever knew about ambiguity and zero in on the "correct" answer? And how is the damn test scored anyway? 3 wrong on the old test would have easily yielded a 750+. This is all caviling and minor problems, and I know that I should be pleased with what I did receive. I would feel more comfortable with improvements into the 99th percentile. But this is me being crazy.